Keranetics' Todd Johnson at the September Triad Biotech Alliance Meeting
After a summer break, the 2011-2012 Speaker Series of the Triad Biotech Alliance kicked off on September 29th with another great event at The Chop House in High Point. The mixer began as they often do – with lots of meeting, mingling and munching on the generous appetizers that the TBA provides. I saw a lot of people that I hadn’t seen in a while and met some new people as well. At around 6:30 pm the speakers series began with a talk from Charles (Todd) Johnson of KeraNetics. I hadn’t been aware of KeraNetics before going to the event, and to be honest, it was such a lovely evening that I almost stayed home for burgers on the grill. However I’m quite glad that I didn’t skip the talk – KeraNetics sounds like a great company doing really interesting things.
As you might guess from their name, KeraNetics works with keratins. To quote from their corporate home page:
“KeraNetics is a biomaterials company utilizing a proprietary process of purifying keratin proteins for use in therapeutic and research applications.”
The short talk that Todd gave couldn’t cover all of their products, but you can read more details about the range of products that they are developing from the “Product Overview” tab. We heard about a topical gel used for burn wound healing, and that has been shown to control burn wound progression. Apparently KeraNetics’ purified keratin proteins have tunable degradation rates, and are human derived, so they are ideal for medical applications. Much of the research being done by the company is funded through grants from the Department of Defense for the ultimate goal of helping Wounded Warriors. There were a few graphic images of soldiers with injuries that might have been difficult to view, if it were not in the context of research aimed at helping such men & women. In addition to burn wound healing, KeraNetics research is developing nerve and bone regeneration applications for their product line. On Oct. 3rd a press release announced that KeraNetics had received an SBIR phase I grant to develop muscle-regenerating biomaterials. Check out their News & Events for more details.
I’ll close this post with two tidbits that I got during the Q & A part of the talk:
The first is from an audience member’s question: Who do you hire? The answer was “mostly PhDs right now” – I think that is very cool to hear because to me it is another indication that the Triad area is drawing innovative, high-tech companies who are hiring highly educated people. Too many editorials in science journals seem to be indicating that universities are churning out too many PhDs for the market & hearing a counter example is a very nice data point.
The second is based on the fact that KeraNetics’ raw keratin source is scrap from the Asian wig industry & I wondered if that source was scalable for the large-scale production of all of the products that KeraNetics is developing. I was assured that there was plenty of hair, and someone whispered that I should watch Chris Rock’s Good Hair movie to learn more about the hair industry – I haven’t yet, but I might just have to some movie night soon.
